MacOS-Like

MacTahoe is a beautiful macOS Tahoe icon theme for Linux, but it can only theme the apps it has artwork for. Everything else keeps its original icon, so your launcher ends up with neat rounded tiles sitting next to bare logos. Its dark variant also keeps the same bright white tiles as the light one.

MacOS-Like fills those gaps. It builds two icon themes on top of MacTahoe, for KDE Plasma and for GTK desktops like GNOME:

• MacOS-Like-Light: every app you have installed that MacTahoe doesn't cover gets its own artwork placed on a Tahoe-style tile, so everything matches. MacTahoe's own dark graphite tiles (Kitty, VS Code, terminals, ...) turn white, and every tile gets the same drop shadow and edge. White and grey tiles all share one shade of white.
• MacOS-Like-Dark: the same, plus dark glass versions of MacTahoe's white tiles and the dark Finder icon from macOS Tahoe. Its graphite and black tiles all share that same glass.

Before and after

In each image, the top row is MacTahoe as it ships and the bottom row is MacOS-Like.

In the light theme, the apps MacTahoe doesn't cover (Google, R, Proton Pass and Claude above) get tiles that match the rest. The ones it does cover keep their artwork, but MacTahoe draws their shadows in many different ways (VS Code and Obsidian have none), so every tile now gets the same one. Its graphite tiles (Kitty and VS Code above) turn white, with white glyphs made dark so they stay readable. An icon keeps its dark tile when that wouldn't work, for example when its artwork is white and black together, or too pale for a white tile. MacTahoe also paints its white tiles in a dozen slightly different whites and greys, and an app's own icon can bring its own white (Proton Pass above), so every plain white or grey tile gets the same one; tiles with a tint of their own keep it. The dark theme also darkens the white tiles of the apps MacTahoe does cover, and gives its graphite and black tiles one shade too. The script only makes tiles for the apps on your own system, so your set will look different. To render these images from your own themes, run python3 screenshots/render.py after ./setup.sh (it needs PyQt6).

What you need

Needed	Arch	Debian / Ubuntu	Fedora
Python 3 + Pillow	python-pillow	python3-pil	python3-pillow
rsvg-convert	librsvg	librsvg2-bin	librsvg2-tools
rsync	rsync	rsync	rsync
MacTahoe icon theme	mactahoe-icon-theme-git (AUR)	upstream install.sh	upstream install.sh

If anything is missing, the script tells you which package to install before it starts.

You don't have to install MacTahoe first. If the script can't find it, it offers to download it from GitHub and install it for you (this needs curl or wget). An existing copy works too, whether it's in your home folder or installed system-wide.

Optional: gtk4-update-icon-cache (or gtk-update-icon-cache) to refresh GTK's icon cache, and matugen if you want the folder colors to follow your wallpaper (see Folder colors).

Install

git clone https://github.com/Scrimas/MacOS-Like.git
cd MacOS-Like
./setup.sh

The themes go into ~/.local/share/icons/MacOS-Like-Light and ~/.local/share/icons/MacOS-Like-Dark (or $XDG_DATA_HOME/icons if you set it). Run it again whenever you install new apps. Icons it already made are kept, so later runs only do the new ones.

Two other ways to run it:

./setup.sh --dry-run   # show what it would generate, change nothing
./setup.sh --force     # redo every icon from scratch

Then pick the theme:

• KDE Plasma: System Settings → Colors & Themes → Icons.
• GNOME: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme MacOS-Like-Dark (or MacOS-Like-Light).

Options

• --source NAME|DIR builds from another MacTahoe color variant, such as MacTahoe-nord, or from a theme folder. Its -dark sibling is used for the dark theme.
• --inherits-light LIST and --inherits-dark LIST choose the fallback themes for icons MacTahoe has no version of at all, for example Papirus-Dark,hicolor. By default the script uses the first of breeze-plus, breeze, Papirus and Adwaita that you have installed.

Using your own artwork for an app

If you'd rather see a different picture for a particular app, even one MacTahoe already covers, copy overrides.conf.example to ~/.config/macos-like/overrides.conf and add lines like:

ryujinx=/usr/share/pixmaps/ryujinx.svg

The name on the left is the app's Icon= value from its .desktop file. On the next run that file is put on a tile in place of MacTahoe's icon.

Keeping an app's dark tile

To keep an app's dark tile in the light theme (a black brand tile, say), copy keep-dark.conf.example to ~/.config/macos-like/keep-dark.conf and list the app's Icon= name, one per line:

kitty
visual-studio-code

It takes effect the next time you run ./setup.sh.

Folder colors

MacTahoe's folders are blue. matugen/recolor_folders.py can recolor them, and the color survives rebuilds:

python3 matugen/recolor_folders.py --color '#e5a50a'   # pick a color
python3 matugen/recolor_folders.py --setup             # follow matugen's palette
python3 matugen/recolor_folders.py --restore           # back to blue

With --setup, the script adds itself to matugen as a post-hook, and the folders take on your palette's color every time matugen runs (usually when you change wallpaper). It edits ~/.config/matugen/config.toml for this, and saves a backup next to it first. Running --color afterwards overrides the palette color until matugen runs again.

If matugen is installed, ./setup.sh will offer to do this for you. Answer no and it won't ask again (delete ~/.config/macos-like/no-matugen-prompt to be asked again).

Uninstall

rm -rf ~/.local/share/icons/MacOS-Like-Light ~/.local/share/icons/MacOS-Like-Dark
rm -rf ~/.local/state/folder-icons ~/.config/macos-like

If you used --setup, also remove the [templates.folder_icons] block from ~/.config/matugen/config.toml.

Credits and license

The themes are built from MacTahoe by vinceliuice, which is licensed under the GPL-3.0. The generated tiles use each app's own icon as their artwork. MacOS-Like is released under the same license (GPL-3.0-or-later), and each theme it builds keeps MacTahoe's COPYING and AUTHORS files.